CASE HISTORIES 6 1 



After two months at sea he became nervous and unable to 

 concentrate, disobeyed orders, and got into trouble with the 

 officers. He was put in the brig, which broke him up completely, 

 and was transferred to a hospital when the ship reached port. 

 He had an obsession that he had been forced to commit some 

 act that was wrong, and he heard voices saying that on account 

 of what he had done he would be buried in a Protestant burying 

 ground instead of in a Catholic cemetery. The voices were some- 

 times pleasant and sometimes accusatory. He was emotionally 

 unstable, varying from cheerful talkative periods to fits of 

 weeping. 



Sex life: He had masturbated two or three times a week. 

 His first heterosexual experience was at seventeen, and he had 

 had many since. He had never committed perversions, but had 

 felt tempted to allow pederasty on the battleship, and had about 

 decided to submit if solicited any more. 



Fantasies: By the time I saw him he had recovered from all 

 but sexual hallucinations and delusions. When first taken sick 

 he thought he had syphilis because he saw a man write four X's 

 on a bottle. He saw various visions : his mother's smiling face 

 in the clouds surrounded by red, white and blue, a little garden 

 of angels, and a red devil on a blue ball between two lights. He 

 had been very homesick and used to hear " spoken letters," that 

 is, the voices of his family and friends saying to him just the 

 things they would write in a letter. He thought some one had 

 doped him in the nose. Around Christmas time he said to himself 

 that he " must stop this stuff, this talking and thinking, that that 

 was being sick," and from then on he had no more visions and 

 heard no more voices. 



One night in January the night nurse saw him get out of bed 

 and with a shoe start beating little O'Neil who was sound asleep 

 in the next bed. My inquiries as to the reason for this attack 

 brought to light some sexual delusions. While in bed just after 

 his being sent to hospital he complained of a pain in his abdomen. 

 A sissified male attendant felt of it, and then remarked to some 

 others that "it was tight." He took the remark to mean that 

 the attendant had committed pederasty on him during his sleep 



